Features
In My Neighbor Totoro’s almost complete abjuration of kiddie movie standbys we have a small tale, simply told, but resplendent with details in its “pictures of ordinary days.” There is always a sense of ongoing life at the periphery of the events depicted.
“A singular being in a plural world” is how Jean Cocteau described the French director Jean Grémillon. His films are sensitive to the tensions between individuals and communities, between the cyclical patterns of daily life and the private obsessions or conflicts that break these rhythms.
Berlin oder ein Traum mit Sahne (Berlin or a Dream with Cream), The Measures, Seven Signs That Mean Silence, Letters to Max, Babash, Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air, Broken Tongue, Sugarcoated Arsenic, The Dragon Is the Frame
An inventory of just about everything that the cinema could do in the year 1931, quite a lot of which still outlines its capabilities today.
A Few Great Pumpkins
Isle of the Dead, Twilight Zone: the Movie, Eyes Without a Face, Candyman, Night of the Demon, Black Sunday, The Babadook
Every single stroke is added to that overall score; your overall score is always the total number of strokes you have performed. Short of deleting the game’s data and reinstalling it, there are no restarts, no practicing. Just you and the desert in a constant march forward.
Later adaptations such as the musical version with Claude Rains and of course, the Andrew Lloyd Webber stage behemoth, tried to harness this sympathetic dimension overtly, but ended up playing down the horror. This is not something Chaney’s Phantom will ever be accused of.
Jia assembles oral histories from individuals shaped by the political upheavals of the last fifty years, opening a new window onto their history and ameliorating a vacuous modernity brought upon Shanghai by the frenzy of the new millennium.
Film festival programming isn’t, and frankly should never be, an exact science.
Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, Manoel de Oliveira’s The Old Man of Belem, Gabriel Abrantes's Taprobana, Eugène Green's La Sapienza, Alexandre Larose’s brouillard - passage #14, Eric Baudelaire's Letters to Max
His new film is certainly underwhelming in my living room, but it’s hard to imagine The Zero Theorem would be much to look at in a theater either, so uninspired are its futuristic images, the likes of which we’ve grown well accustomed to since the days of Blade Runner.
The relationship between video games and film is one of love-hate in the various discourses around the two media—the creators of each often seem to both desire and reject the credibility of the other.
If being a cinephile—watching, thinking, talking, and writing about cinema—is at once a social and solitary activity, how could one begin to describe the paradoxical situation of an Iranian cinephile?
If the critical community’s collective prejudice against the “message movie” becomes rigid dogma, then it will miss out on works such as those by pioneering Hong Kong filmmaker Patrick Lung Kong.